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Post by Mestemia on May 19, 2006 18:02:09 GMT -5
He tap danced around a whole lot more than this NSA phone stuff.
He tap danced all around the prison scandal and 9-11. Not to mention the alleged ties between Sadam and Al-quida, the WMD, where oh where is Bin Ladin?
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Post by teancum79 on May 19, 2006 18:59:58 GMT -5
I'm still waiting on some stuff. I talked to a guy who was one the ground in Iraq at the very first he said they did find WMD. Far form conclusive proof granted, but it does make me wonder.
I've not looked to close at the prison stuff yet. I guess I figure those sort of things should be dealt with, but I'm not sure if I can hold the president responsible for prisoner mistreatment any more than the Pope for pervert priest.
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Post by dianaholberg on May 19, 2006 21:54:47 GMT -5
Regarding your Orwellian prediction, littlepea, there is much buzz about that at the grassroots level. As teancum points out, though, the difficulty is in translating that buzz into a change in leadership. The media here has made it impossible for candidates to run a clean campaign. Would-be politicians know they will have to defend themselves against personal charges (sometimes trumped up) at least as much as they debate the issues. As a result, we end up with candidates who don't mind discussing their sketchy pasts.... *sigh*
I should post this in the "change" thread -- if I could change one thing, I would make it possible to keep charges against politicians regarding their private lives out of the media, unless they are criminal charges followed by prosecution.
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Post by teancum79 on May 19, 2006 22:29:41 GMT -5
The sad thing there is one guy, Mitt Romney, who is clean as a whistle (as far as politicians go), but he is not Protestant and the religious right won't vote for him (wrong kind of Christian), but policy wise he is one of the smarter guys I've seen running.
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Post by littlepea on May 23, 2006 4:43:09 GMT -5
Regarding your Orwellian prediction, littlepea, there is much buzz about that at the grassroots level. As teancum points out, though, the difficulty is in translating that buzz into a change in leadership. The media here has made it impossible for candidates to run a clean campaign. Would-be politicians know they will have to defend themselves against personal charges (sometimes trumped up) at least as much as they debate the issues. As a result, we end up with candidates who don't mind discussing their sketchy pasts.... *sigh* I should post this in the "change" thread -- if I could change one thing, I would make it possible to keep charges against politicians regarding their private lives out of the media, unless they are criminal charges followed by prosecution. i guess orwell's other prediction in 1984, "freedom is slavery", also rings true. in this case i mean that independant, privately run media can basically dictate public opinion, thus making it impossible for the layman to form an accurate opinion of who to vote for. you could almost use this as a basis for not voting at all, since there's no way you can know which candidate would make the better president due to the biased media - still, at least we are free not to vote. (the UK is very fortunate to have an impartial media source such as the BBC, though most newspapers are biased one way or the other - it is well-known that the left-wing tabloids ensured that tony blair became prime minister in 1997) i can demonstrate my point on a smaller scale from my own experience - in 2004 (1st year at university) there was an election for a scottish member of parliament to represent us in the EU (or something like that) and one of my friends was telling us that we should vote for the green party's representative since he would give extra priority to making sure that the scottish fisheries weren't given a raw deal by EU negotiations. i didn't go out and vote and my friend was annoyed with me, but how can i vote when i don't know what each person stands for and i am in no position to judge which principles would be most beneficial to the country anyway? and i'm certainly not going to vote green just because my friend told me to.
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Post by dianaholberg on May 23, 2006 10:50:43 GMT -5
I consider voting to be a privilege that very few people in the world have. I rarely abstain from an election, even if I don't know about the candidates. Most of them are basically good people doing their best, regardless. But meantime, I don't want to lose the privilege of having a voice in the polls should it ever become absolutely necessary to vote a certain way (as I consider to have been the case in the last presidential election).
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Post by teancum79 on May 23, 2006 18:06:26 GMT -5
I think voting is important. I try to vote in national elections and also for referendums that will alter state law. More often than not I do not bother with local elections as I do not know enough about the issues (if there are any) being dealt with and in my current case I will only be staying in the community for a shot while.
Sadly it is imposable to know just what a person will do after they are elected. It would have been very easy to guess that Bush would have gone to war with Iraq, but the NSA phone recored thing is not the sort of thing most people could have seen coming.
You just have to vote for the person who you think will do the best job and hope they will honor the position they are in.
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Post by littlepea on May 24, 2006 8:59:20 GMT -5
i don't mean to encourage lethargy, and my failure to vote in that local election was more because of apathy than lethergy (ie. it's not that i'm lazy, it's just that i didn't care). i vote in general elections (the things that decide which party is in power in westminster, and therefore also our prime minister) and i vote for the scottish nationalist party. the reason i vote for them despite knowing nothing about the individual i'm voting for is simply that i want scotland to be independant of the UK and the SNP are the party more likely to achieve that (they are significantly more popular than the other parties who want independance) - basically a tactical vote, and i also vote in my home town constituency rather than when i live at the moment since the SNP candidate there is closer to winning their constituency than the one here.
anyway, my original point was just getting at how capitalism ensures that the media controls public opinion, which is not very far away from the paradox "freedom is slavery".
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